From the comments:

I would be interested in more of your thoughts on western popular culture. Thanks for keeping up with this blog, I have learned a lot! For now, I quietly wait for a post that I can add insight to

Having lived basically my entire adult life in overwhelmingly coastal liberal US cities I’m not personally very familiar with “Red America” (though long-time readers will be aware that my adolescence was spent in the inter-Montane West, in a town not too different from what you might see in Napoleon Dynamite). So I’ve become fascinated recently about what one can learn by watching “bro-country” videos. Compare for example the video above of Florida Georgia Line’s Cruise remixed from the origin with the rapper Nelly, to the original below:

Even more explicit in terms of the cultural values which are at the heart of “bro-country” is their video for “Dirt”:

We tend to view past cultures through their production of literature and visual arts. The music of the United States naturally maps onto to subcultural divisions, and seems to me to be a great way to explore the diversity. Though I’m not sure how “cross-over” productions like the above with Nelly turn out, often the values and ethos are dissonant.

If you are new to this area, this critique of “bro-country” hits many of the tropes of the genre:

A few people have mentioned that my Goodreads profile has been helpful to them. I used to find Amazon’s recommendations very useful, but lately that’s been less so, perhaps because the low hanging fruit has been picked. So manual/human curation has been more important for me of late. As an example, I really like checking out Thomas Mailund’s profile. Anyway, because of the feedback I went back last night and roughly categorized all my books. So instead of having to sift through a bunch of mediocre fantasy or science fiction, if you want to see a bunch of books on genetics that I remember reading, now just look in that shelf.

Finally, I wanted to mention a book I hadn’t talked about much that I saw on my profile, that’s Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. The book is 15 years old, and so probably dated. I’m actually curious to go back and re-read it now. But it was arguably one of the major reasons I’m here now, as someone who is professionally a genome-nut. Of Ridley’s book I think it’s probably the most readable.

It’s been a while since I did one of these. Sometimes people want have a thread to say a few things about themselves, as that way they can know who else they’re talking to and with. You can use a pseudo, but please don’t use “anon” or “anonymous”, since it is hard to tell people apart. Though some of the more frequent commenters are well known to each other, it seems there has been a influx of new people since I left Discover….

Today I was running with a friend and we were talking about some details in relation to perceptions of particular definitions on the part of biologists. My friend is a molecular biologist, whose work is primarily in biochemistry, and she reminded me that there’s a strange confusion in relation to the term epistasis. A problem that I’m at the root of in her case. Back when she was prepping for her qualifying exams a professor who was helping her study asked her what epistasis was. When we were going over this term almost everyone defined epistasis in a fashion which was recognizable to molecular biologists. That is, as interactions between genes which are concretely mediated by upstream and downstream pathways and produce discrete alternative phenotypes. But there is another way to conceptualize epistasis, and that is in an evolutionary/statistical sense, often interpreted as deviation from additivity of genetic effect. I immediately brought up this distinction, and when my friend relayed this during her prep session the professor had no idea what she was talking about. Now the issue is coming to the fore again, as it is clear from talking to undergraduates that they’re totally unfamiliar with the evolutionary/statistical definition of epistasis, in part because many of their professors are not aware of it. Not only that, but they tend to take the molecular pathways model (see slide 8) so literally that they’d likely not recognize Bateson’s original definition which relied on phenotypes.

Now, I understand that DNA is a big deal. I read The Double Helix. Molecular genetics changed everything, including the study of evolution. But with genomics I would argue that a more quantitative and formal perspective needs to come back into the discipline in a more thoroughgoing manner. The neglect of evolutionary/statistical frameworks in favor of purely molecular/biochemical ones in undergraduate education due to the nature of the training of some researchers is going to be an issue down the line.

With that in mind, see Epistasis—the essential role of gene interactions in the structure and evolution of genetic systems, in Nature Reviews Genetics. Box 1 has the definitions which I’m alluding to above. And below is a post I wrote in 2005, based on reading of Epistasis and Evolutionary Process.

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Last week The Los Angeles Times had a write up about the new Pluto mission, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zooms in on Pluto. This has been many years in coming, as the spacecraft launched in 2006. The “flyby” is going to occur in July of this year, when spacecraft whizzes by the planet. But the first photos are now being taken. Unfortunately it’s going to take a long long time to analyze and process the data. For the details, see Emily Lakadwalla’s post. Cassini-Huygens is still ongoing, but the excitement of New Horizons is that Pluto is very much virgin territory, rather like the original Voyager missions to the outer solar system.

I know it’s in vogue to talk about all the lack of progress in our current epoch (see: Peter Thiel). And to some extent I think there’s something to this critique of the age. But it also speaks to how far we’ve come in terms of our velocity that there hasn’t been much press coverage of these planetary missions. They’re now “normal science.”

Fitness is an easy concept to talk about, but in practice it can be quite slippery. This would seem to contradict John Maynard Smith’s contention that biologists have it easy in comparison to social scientists in the context of game theory, because the bookkeeping is easier since fitness is an obvious currency. In any case, until recently outside of laboratory conditions fitness and its evolutionary genetic converse load have been of theoretical rather than empirical interest. But with genomics, and the ability to detect deleterious alleles to a high degree of precision these old issues have become live anew.

In 2008 a paper came out which reported that Europeans had more genetic load than Africans, Proportionally more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations. At the time I recall Greg Cochran was somewhat skeptical on grounds of biomedicine, and some rather unrealistic demographic assumptions (an realistically long bottleneck). The basic finding was simple, because of the “Out of Africa” event Europeans (and presumably all non-Africans) would exhibit a higher load of deleterious alleles because of the reduced power of selection in relation to drift. Over the past seven years that simple result has come under critique, and the first author of the 2008 paper now has a review which resolves the conflicting results, The distribution of deleterious genetic variation in human populations, out (the link is to the preprint, which has been around for a while). The short of it seems to be that the distribution of frequencies of deleterious alleles may differ across populations as a function of demographic history, with the bottleneck and rapid population growth resulted in an excess of rare alleles in non-Africans, but the large population producing more efficacy of selection. The theory itself in the paper is less interesting to me than the conclusion. Here he states:

Future work should include examining empirical patterns of deleterious mutations in other human populations that have differing populations histories, such as different amounts of recent population growth. Studies with large samples of individuals will be particularly helpful as they will be informative regarding how deleterious mutations have behaved during recent times….

Genomics is powerful. For the sort of subtle evolutionary patterns which researchers are trying to sniff out it strikes me that good quality whole genomes in larger numbers across more populations are probably necessary before we can make robust generalizations about humans, let alone other species. Cautious is definitely important because the first wave of SNP-chip results seem to have produced a set of results which were interpreted in light of theory, without understanding that the empirical results were only a sliver of reality constrained by the methods at hand.

I spent a bit of this morning on a playground with my daughter, and tried really hard not to hover around her, as is in the norm among parents of my socioeconomic status in the United States (this behavior should most certainly be obviated by the fact that this is a “child safe” playground). This always gets me to thinking about variation in child rearing over history and across cultures. There seems to be an instinct to assume there is one true way to raise children, and this tendency is often quite costly in time and mental energy. The New York Times highlights this nicely with an article titled The Only Baby Book You’ll Ever Need, where the author relays the insights from a academic work by an anthropologist, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. The basic observation is pretty straightforward, in some cultures very young children are not cossetted, they are either non-persons, or, they are small adults with non-trivial responsibilities. By “some” cultures what you really mean are the vast majority of societies known across human history, including in the recent past the ancestor of developed Western societies. The contrast here is mostly between WEIRD cultures and non-WEIRD cultures.

But there needs to be a bit more precision here, because the behavior that is alluded to in The New York Times refers to the core readership of that periodical, and don’t reflect all Western societies, or even all American social strata. Before my daughter was born my wife read Bringing Up Bébé, which highlights how different French and American parenting wisdom can be. And even within American society there is variation. Much of what is defined as “American” in these comparative studies actually reflect the folkways of upper middle class cosmopolitans, the sort of people who write and read books on parenting (though this segment of the populace is often the leading indicator of social norms more broadly). And even within living memory the parenting wisdom of the American upper middle class has changed a great deal.

So not only does parenting wisdom vary across cultures, it varies within culture (or perhaps more precisely across subcultures, and over time within a culture. But there’s a final piece of the puzzle which is important to note, a fair amount of the variation in outcomes of children is not due to parental choice in any case. More precisely, about ~10 percent of the variation in outcomes of your children on many metrics is due to the choices you make in a distinctive sense as against what other parents do, while ~40 percent is due to variation in genes, and ~50 percent is just unknown (and often referred to as “environmental”, but in a sense that it isn’t accounted for in additive genetic variance; it could be developmental stochasticity, and so still biological). If you read The Blank Slate or Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids you’ll know this, though perhaps the best primer on this topic is Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption.

Meanwhile, there are serious social and legal consequences for raising your kids in a way which wouldn’t have been atypical up until the 1980s. The culture can be irrational longer than you can resist….

Addendum: Two points I forgot to bring up. First, it strikes me that the expected number of children you are going to have shapes these mores. The “high investment” strategy probably doesn’t scale well. It is probably harder to cosset kids when you have half a dozen. Second, the behavior genetic work often focuses on variation within a population. So obviously the cultural context might matter, equalizing outcomes across many families. The key isn’t to think that NOTHING you do matters, but the return on the margin in comparison to peer cohorts for extra effort probably is pretty low. That being said, my daughter is starting Kumon this week so she can read early. Less for academic preparation than for the fact that both her parents are readers, so it seems she’ll enjoy herself more if she can read to herself as early as possible.

Last week I finished The Northern Crusades, and I much liked it. Two books which would be excellent complements are Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 and God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. I’ve gone back to Wonderful Life, and again find myself annoyed by Stephen Jay Gould’s pompous and self-aggrandizing tendencies. But I do find when he goes straight to the descriptive science, such as anatomy which I am not familiar with, he is far less insufferable. Though I’m reading Wonderful Life partly to get to its rebuttal, Crucible of Creation. When I can’t handle Gould I’ve been going through Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Years ago I enjoyed his The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, and since I’m a big reader I figured his more recent book would be of interest to me. Finally, I’ve put Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830 in my stack. I read volume 1, but never finished volume 2.

Any books you are reading?